What we call growth, is it not a
perpetual absorption of Nature, the identification of the individual
with the universal? And may we not, in speculative moods, consider
Death as the grand impatience of the soul to free itself from the
circle of individual activity--the yearning of the creature to be
united with the Creator?
'As with Life, so with knowledge, which is intellectual life. In the
early days of man's history, Nature and her marvellous ongoings were
regarded with but a casual and careless eye, or else with the merest
wonder. It was late before profound and reverent study of her laws
could wean man from impatient speculations; and now, what is our
intellectual activity based on, except on the more thorough mental
absorption of Nature? When that absorption is completed, the mystic
drama will be sunny clear, and all Nature's processes be visible to
man, as a Divine Effluence and Life.'
True: yet not all the truth. But who knows all the truth?
Not I. 'We see through a glass darkly,' said St. Paul of old; and
what is more, dazzle and weary our eyes, like clumsy microscopists,
by looking too long and earnestly through the imperfect and by no
means achromatic lens.
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